Eldritch Moon review: Well damn, everything’s sprouted tentacles

New Magic expansion is dark and interesting to play, with a dash of added weird.

The second half of Magic: The Gathering’s return to Innistrad, Eldritch Moon (EMN), will be released on July 22—but we've been lucky enough to play with the set already. Read on for our review of the newest addition to the Magic line, as the mystery of the madness infecting Innistrad is revealed...

Enlarge/ Surprise! It was Emrakul who had been hiding out in Innistrad and was causing some, er, issues.

Emrakul, the Promised End.

Moving on from the brooding sense of horror in Shadows over Innistrad (SOI), EMN is the big reveal, with the last Eldrazi titan—Emrakul—arriving on the plane to wreak havoc. For people who missed our otherMagic reviews, Emrakul is one of three giant reality-warping creatures with clear Lovecraftian influences, and her tentacled touch is what’s behind the events in SOI.

From a game mechanics sense, this means the end of Investigate from the first set, as the mystery is solved, and the addition of several new mechanics—Emerge, Meld, and Escalate—to represent things going from bad to worse. In general, follow-up sets in Magic can be a little more experimental, as players now have had some time to get the grasp with the foundations, and EMN really delivers on the “new and weird” front.

The mechanics of Eldritch Moon

Madness, Delirium and transforming double-faced cards are all back, which is great news. Despite our issues with Delirium in SOI, the play experience of it has been pretty fun, and the other two have been brilliant, even with the slight physical-world troubles provided by double-faced cards. Madness especially is exciting to see more of, since a deck taking advantage of its unique discard/play mechanism now has more options from which to choose.

As ever, it’s hard to get the full story arc across in the tools a card game has available—a few scattered pieces of flavour text and small art pieces on every card—but the feel of the world being corrupted is on point. The art continues in the modern Magic tradition of showing definitive events and creatures in gorgeous full colour, and individual cards even tell their own little stories.

The cards in EMN do a good job of telling a story. Liliana arrives to save the day… with a bunch of Zombies / What's in the box? / Revive a dead creature, but split it into two: a little spirit with its abilities, and a dumb zombie body.

The story is also cleverly multi-level. If you want to just pick up the cards, appreciate the art, and not worry about the wider story, that’s fine—the core gameplay is still satisfying. If you want to appreciate some of the weirder cards, and build decks around them, you can. And if you’re dying to release your inner fantasy nerd, then Wizards of the Coast publishes full stories on its website. Some of these stories stand out a little more than others, especially those following some of the minor characters caught in the middle of EMN’s struggles, but they’re enjoyable enough overall.

The greatest mood-setting that the game does, however, is still with its double-faced cards. One of the key themes in Innistrad is transformation, but the added twist with the Eldrazi is that almost all of the EMN transformations are irreversible—there’s no getting your nice humans back to normal once they’ve sprouted tentacles. There’s only one day/night transformation left for werewolves, with most of the new transforming wolves going from “terrible beast” to “terrible eldritch beast with 10 limbs."

You’ll notice that the other side of the double-faced cards are a little different too. They’re colourless, a callback to the nature of Eldrazi first explored through devoid back in the Zendikar block, as they transcend normal coloured mana. This theme continues through to one of the other new mechanics, Emerge, which appears on giant Eldrazi creatures with colourless mana costs—but with the option to burst forth from your existing creatures for coloured mana, getting a discount in exchange for sacrificing one of your allies.

Emerge cards give you some interesting options, like finding out what happens when you mix a classic fantasy creature with an alien abomination, or playing that crab/ship/Cthulhu hybrid you've always wanted.

Escalate: Burn now, or burn more later.

These beasts serve several purposes from a design view, and are some of the best cards in the set from a gameplay perspective. Many Magic players enjoy casting huge spells and creatures, but the game is best when it supports multiple strategies, so that one way to play the game doesn’t become dominant.

Emerge cards can work in lots of different ways—decks that want to play it slow can hold out until they can pay the huge mana costs, whilst quicker decks can cash in their smaller creatures for larger ones to overwhelm their opponents early.

Escalate, the final new mechanic in EMN, doesn’t directly reflect the flavour of the Eldrazi, but rather is meant to reflect things getting out of hand on Innistrad. Escalate appears on a few modal spells in the set, giving a player the option to make the spell more powerful, but also more expensive.

Whilst not being as memorable or awesome as transformations, Escalate is a fine mechanic that leads to some solid gameplay choices should you play the spell early to try and gain the upper hand, or wait to cast it at its max potential later?